R.A.B.B.i.T - Announcing the voice of the Rabbit

As we approach the end of R.A.B.B.i.T.'s development, we have one big announcement we've been wanting to share for quite some time now...

THE VOICE OF THE RABBITS

Shortly after coming up with "R.A.B.B.i.T." as the name of the game, we stumbled on the idea of having someone "voice" 'Ninja Rabbit' (the Pseudo generic name for the central character, before we had envisioned the randomly-generated rabbits idea), and we immediately had someone in mind.

So about six weeks ago, we asked one of our close friends, James Chicken (@Jamro1149), if he would be interested in both providing the effects of the rabbit as well as getting a full credit in the game and he immediately jumped (or perhaps that should be hopped!) at the opportunity. We had figured James would be up for the task and we really liked the idea that a guy called "Chicken" would be voicing our character called "Rabbit".

Last Thursday (3rd December) the three of us finally got together and captured an entire repertoire of rabbit-sounding effects, with James providing various high-pitched 'squeaks' and 'eeeks' to cues like "Sound like you've just jumped off of a platform excitedly", "You're falling uncontrollable" and "You've just hit a wall at high speed" (Some of these were actually fairly loud and sounded a little sexual in nature, so we were worried about what the people in the shop below us would be thinking).

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Since then, we're been editing together this collection of effects and trying to work out how they would work (if at all) in the final game. Before implementing anything, we decided to put together a rough cut using some pre-recorded gameplay, then layered on a mock-up of the sound effects and background ambience. This is what we ended up with:

Right now, we have about 50% of the core effects implemented in game (and, at the time of writing, we're just in the middle of publishing a new Android Open BETA which includes these changes). As well as continuing to work on the implementing the remaining effects and music, we also have a system ready to go in where each uniquely-spawned rabbit has a slightly different pitch to his voice (although we need to test this before we know if we're going to keep it, or not).

REMAINING RABBIT WORK

This week we're trying to get the last few bits and pieces of R.A.B.B.i.T. finalised and ready for release. The big remaining things include:

Our (very rough plan) is to get the majority of it done by the end of the week and then do any remaining stuff early next week. We're hoping by Wednesday-ish to have the initial release complete and, potentially have the game in stores before Christmas (on Android anyway, with iOS close behind). But it's totally determined by how well things go over the next few days.